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My daughter is almost 5 and she picked up Scratch Jr in ten minutes. I am writing my suggestions mostly from the context of a younger child. I approached it t
by tmaly 9y ago
My daughter is almost 5 and she picked up Scratch Jr in ten minutes. I am writing my suggestions mostly from the context of a younger child.
I approached it this way, I bought a book on Scratch Jr so I could get up to speed on it. I walked her through a few of the basics, and then I just let her take over after that.
One other programming related activity we have done is the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity. She has a lot of fun with this as you have a small mouse you program with simple directions to navigate a maze to find the cheese. It uses a set of cards to help then grasp the steps needed. I switch to not using the cards after a while. We now just step the mouse through the maze manually adding steps as we go.
One other activity to consider is the robot turtles board game. This teaches some basic logic concepts needed in programming.
For an older child, I did help my nephew to learn programming in Python when he was a freshman in high school. I took the approach of having him type in games from the free Python book. I have always though this was a good approach for older kids to get the familiar with the syntax.
Something else I would consider would be a robot that can be programmer with Scratch. While I have not done this yet, I think for kid seeing the physical results of programming via a robot is a powerful way to capture interest.
- dpeck 9y agoThanks for sharing about Scratch Jr. I had never heard about it before that I think my son is going to love it, not for the programming aspect of it but because he loves to make up stories with characters and being able to make them move around the screen I'm betting will be something he enjoys quite a bit. It feels like a nice mix of Kidpix and Flash, both of which I spent a lot of time with as a youngster (obviously much less of a youngster during the Flash time).
- tmaly 9y agoone of the features kids seem to love most about Scratch Jr is the character editing ability. You can also take pictures of yourself and super impose it on the characters.
- Tempest1981 9y agoScratch is a great community, where it's easy to explore others' creations, and share. The language is block-based. The output is graphical. And you can run anyone's program, and then view the source to see how they did it. Not many data structures, iirc.
- kaybe 9y agoFriends of mine have the boardgame roborally. You get a bunch of cards with instructions to your robot and have to predict which ones in which order work best. Of course, the environment has some hard-to-predict elements, including other people's robots... https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally
- johnnycodes 9y agoThank you for this. My daughter will be 5 later this year and, I myself have started learning to code. I feel like it will be good time with my kid teaching and helping her. I even built her a game with tkinter to help with math and reading that we can do together.
- tmaly 9y agoI have taken the approach to just finding activities across a variety of topics like chemistry, electronics, programming, art etc
- johnnycodes 9y agoYeah, I'm going to start finding games that are educational in different topics to encourage learning that her and I can both play. Have you had any success with other educational board games with your little one? I looked into Scratch JR and the robot turtles game which I'm going to get her for her 5th birthday.
- tmaly 9y agohave you heard of Magnetic MightyMind? Those puzzles are really great for the mind. You have to figure out how to place these different shaped magnet pieces into different puzzle shapes.
- johnnycodes 9y agoI just watched the video on Amazon for that, and I really like it. Thank you for the suggestion.